korg poly-61 vs korg poly800 vs korg dw-8000. i have the dw-8000 . i like the wack sound i can make out of it . just had a poly 800 for free and its more fun than i tough. i heard very little of the poly 61 but i like the sound. can someone compare it to one of the two others or both?

Joey wrote:the 61 has the best filter... SSM, and it has them for each voice

The Poly 6 has the SSMs, the 61 uses some NJM chips. I think I read somewhere the NJMs are equivalent to some standard chips of some sort, LM13600 (?).

The 61 might be DCO but it has two oscillators, one with PWM and I think it sounds great. The filter is excellent, very gritty and characterful. Check out the Synthmania demos. If you can find a Poly 61M for cheap, I'd recommend grabbing it.

Yup.... Poly-61 filters are based on a garden-variety dual OTA chip, the LM13600 ( originally made by National Semiconductor ) or NJM13600 ( same thing, from New Japan Radio ). And it's a 2-pole filter, so different sounding than the usual 4-pole filter. And there are loads of 13600 chips around if replacement is needed. The Polysix uses the SSM2044 chip. Poly-800 uses the NJM2069 ( same chip as Korg DW synths ).

If I didn't had an EX-800 already I would have most likely searched a Poly-61 for myself. But since the Poly / EX-800 -experience hasn't been all that I was hoping for - and I wasn't really hoping for much - I'd most likely skip any prospect of buying one for even a reasonable price.

I've owned both the Poly 800 and Poly 61 and I'd like to say that they are very different from each other. The 800 is incapable of producing a true saw wave. What it does is it creates five consecutively shorter pulse waves and then locks them all into the same phase, giving you something that resembles a saw, but not closely. It sounds very icy and digital because of this, and the 61 produces real saw. That gives it a much warmer sound. The one thing that is similar between the two is the editing interface. You're using buttons to edit everything, but it works well and there's no menu diving for hidden parameters. I've never played a DW-8000, but between the 800 and 61, my vote is for the 61. If you can find a 61M get that: then you'll have MIDI implementation too.